15Five Launches Kona, The AI-Powered Manager Effectiveness Coach, At 15Five Next

Kona provides tailored coaching and enablement to managers in native workflows like Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet helping improve critical manager effectiveness skills that increase performance, engagement, and retention

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--15Five, the AI-powered performance management platform that drives action and impact for thousands of organizations, today announced the launch of Kona by 15Five at its virtual event, Next. The launch follows 15Five’s January acquisition of Kona.

An AI-powered coach for managers, Kona joins virtual meetings and provides personalized, privacy-conscious coaching and enablement in the flow of work. Kona uses data from 15Five such as performance reviews and engagement surveys alongside the context it builds over time to help people managers continuously level up across a wide range of critical skillsets – from leading more effective meetings to navigating difficult performance conversations. Kona automatically measures changes in manager behavior so HR leaders can see what’s working and what needs rethought in an ongoing way.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the largest drop. Gallup has previously highlighted how engagement of managers strongly correlates with that of their teams, with a 70% variance in team engagement being attributed to managers. This underscores the role managers play in fostering a positive work environment, promoting growth, and maximizing performance.

“HR leaders know that managers are the critical lynchpin for maximum employee performance, engagement and retention,” said Jim Morrisroe, 15Five’s CEO. “Failing to equip them with personalized enablement tools and training minimizes the role they play in increasing performance, engagement, and retention on their teams to drive organizational success. Kona enables organizations to deploy personalized manager enablement at scale, helping HR teams further unlock the impact of manager effectiveness, and early adopters have already seen meaningful results in this regard.”

“As a growing company, we’re promoting rockstar individual contributors into management roles, but we can’t scale traditional coaching fast enough,” said Jenn Sobocinski, Senior Director of People and Culture at ReUp Education, an early adopter of Kona. “Kona is helping us support those new managers in real time, with feedback that helps them adjust and grow immediately. It’s also changed how I run my own meetings. This kind of continuous, in-the-flow coaching is exactly what fast-growing companies need.”

“We’ve heard CHROs and CEOs clearly: they need managers to be the drivers of business success,” said Sid Pandiya, 15Five’s General Manager of Manager Products and former CEO of Kona. “But being a manager is more complicated than ever before. Instead of one-size-fits-all solutions that HR hopes will work, 15Five’s manager products are personalized based on data such as performance reviews, engagement surveys, and manager effectiveness measurements, so everyone can focus on what matters most. Even in the early days of building Kona by 15Five, we’ve seen how personalization powered by data, combined with continuous measurement, enables HR to see where efforts are working and where they need to double down.”

15Five helps HR teams drive real change at scale with easy-to-use performance reviews and surveys, including engagement, eNPS, manager effectiveness, and onboarding, actionable insights about where to focus and why, and manager products that address hot spots to drive impact.

To learn more about Kona by 15Five and how 15Five helps HR leaders, managers, and organizations drive business results, visit https://www.15five.com/.

About 15Five

15Five is the AI-powered performance management platform that drives business impact. 15Five is how the world’s best HR teams increase employee performance, engagement, and retention with flexible measurements, easy-to-use analytics, targeted action plans, and AI-powered manager learning, coaching, and enablement. 15Five helps companies run performance reviews, engagement surveys, manager effectiveness measurements, and employee lifecycle surveys, as well as integrate with HRIS demographic and people data, so that HR leaders can make data-driven decisions about where to focus and why. 15Five helps HR leaders address these challenges in partnership with managers by increasing manager effectiveness at scale using manager products including Kona, Coaching, Content, and manager tools. Learn more at www.15five.com.

Contacts

Megan Lampros
megan.lampros@15five.com
847-977-1922